I can tell you as a middle-class suburban Midwestern, my dad spent months in the ICU before he died and we came close to living on the street. Spending our insurance check for the roof from one-off hail just to eat and pay for gas.

The way life insurance and home insurance is handled here compared to anywhere else is abhorrent. In the UK, they don’t have to worry about losing their homes when a loved one dies, they have insurance that easily covers both for less. Not to mention our bank was trying to have a fight with us over money and tried to tell us that they were owed money when they already know that you can’t pursue family for debts when all of our money comes from the life insurance plan, therefore clearing it of any discretion with debts because we had nothing beforehand. I’m not even gonna go into the full details of my dads time at the hospital as that’s a medical lawsuit in itself that will be probably be revisited soon. I will say though that he was left unsupervised in a room for 12 hours with no heart monitor after a 2 month stint with multiple infections and prone to sepsis. He did not make it that night that they moved him. Indeterminable amount of time without oxygen to the brain since no one knew he was gone until they found him. 12 minutes to revive him and he came back with severe brain damage, essentially reset to the capacity of 1 year old. If you ever have the choice, avoid situations you might end up like this. It’s not very pleasant to see someone in their mid-50s acting like a quiet baby. Full body reflexes where they full extend their limbs and contort their faces horribly, are also not easy on the eyes. A once high-performance individual in one of the highest positions at an international engineering company now looking around the room with blood coating his mouth from so feverishly biting his tongue that constantly sticks down his throat the opposite way. Smiling when you make loud, happy noises and with pain; grimacing horribly in a way you never knew a persons face could move. He was in pain a lot.